“U.S. imports of goods from Korea have increased 18 percent, or $10.8 billion…”

Sorry about that, too.

How could this have happened? I’ll tell you how. It’s simple. Despite claims, these trade deals are written and calculated to torpedo economies. That’s what Globalists do.

Why?

Because an ultimate top-down takeover of populations is easier that way.

Here’s another example: NAFTA. Remember that trade treaty? It enabled, among other consequences, the export of very cheap corn—massive amounts—from the US to Mexico. Result? 1.5 million Mexican corn farmers were thrown out of business. Boom. Many of them decided to come across the border to the US.

Does that sound like an all-around economy-building scenario?

Globalism: the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

No more countries—only elite corporations in control, making markets wherever they can find them…

There’s just one problem. As these corporations and their Globalist leaders play economic game with countries and their people, the net effect is decreasing the number of customers who can afford to buy the corporations’ products.

You can’t just shift the beneficiaries of trade deals from one nation to another, in an unending shuffle and reshuffle of the deck. Sooner or later, you wind up with more sellers than buyers.

You create more overall chaotic conditions.

Elite corporations don’t want to think about this.

They’re counting on governments to bail them out with, for example, some form of “universal income” for citizens, which means expanded welfare. That isn’t going to cut it. Piddling “new money” isn’t going to invent, magically, a billion or two new customers for cars and cell phones and houses.

Basically, these corporations are playing Musical Chairs among themselves. Which companies will survive, and which will fall?

The corporations are dreaming about a controlled future in which they are more powerful kings. It isn’t going to work out. Even mergers and acquisitions won’t win the day.

Robust economies depend on many, many small and large businesses operating in relative freedom, in stable nations.

The fantasy of one global economy is intrinsically a hoax.

When you eliminate tariffs (the goal of all trade treaties), you accentuate the differences between various labor forces. Giant corporations shut down factories in countries where labor is expensive and laws against gross polluting are “obstructing profits,” and they open up those factories in places where labor is dirt cheap and you can pollute night and day.

That isn’t free enterprise. That’s ongoing crime.

Someone eventually pays the piper.

Corporations believe they can, with their Globalist partners, keep postponing a day of reckoning indefinitely.

They’re wrong. The bottom line is the corporations’ bottom line: fewer buyers for their products. They can’t wriggle out of that one.

Free enterprise is the last thing on Globalists’ minds. They want a single worldwide planned economy, with central points for production and distribution of goods and services.

They want a tighter Surveillance State. They want a single toxic medical cartel to dominate citizens’ lives. They want to install many features that add up to massive top-down control.

In this atmosphere, elite corporations are going to thrive?

The truth is, Globalists are USING corporations, temporarily, to forward their aims.

Those corporations don’t want to see this. They want to remain blind. They want to dream their dreams.

These titans, with all their skills, turn out to be the masters of self-delusion.

Stable and separate nations, not Globalism, is the solution staring them in the face.

But they keep their eyes closed.

—Look at Europe. Under the aegis of the Globalist European Union (EU), it is the canary in the coal mine. And the canary is bringing back devastating messages.

Nations are being disrupted and torn by the EU’s forced immigration policy of open borders. Widespread crime, crushing budgets to support the wave of migration, massive unrest.

In this atmosphere, European mega-corporations are going to flourish and grow? New customers are going to appear out of nowhere?

Dream on.

Recall the old term “double cross?” A person allied with one side in a deal secretly betrays the deal and the ally. That’s what Globalist elites are doing to giant corporations.

They’re going back on their promise.

They’re creating an atmosphere in which corporations can’t function beyond a certain point. And worse, they’re creating a forced planetary economy in which the corporations will become mere government appendages—functionaries in a slave-based system.

These deluded corporations…it only takes a few of them to wake up and see the real game.

“That we see the left aligned with the ruling elites against Trump is proof that the left has abandoned the working class.”

“Clearly, the pathetic remnant of the American left has more hate for those who stand up for the working class than they have for those oppressing the working class and those fomenting war. Why did the women so quick to march against Trump not march against the Clinton, Bush/Cheney, and Obama regimes for killing, maiming, orphaning, widowing, and dislocating millions of peoples in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria?”

On Trump’s third day Trump is one up on the Establishment. Can this last?

I am not a Trump booster. I am a scorekeeper.

On the third day of his presidency Donald Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacificic Partnership (TPP). Based on this we must assume he will also deep-six the Trans-Atlantic Partnership.

Trump and his advisors regard the Pacific and Atlantic partnerships as trade deals like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement that sent American jobs to Mexico at the expense of Americans.

However, the most strategic part of these agreements is that they make global corporations immune from the laws of the countries in which they do business if those laws adversely impact the profits of the global corporations.

Who decides the question? Not the courts of the countries or a world court. The question is decided by a corporate tribunal staffed only by corporations.

In other words, the sovereign laws of sovereign countries, such as France’s laws against GMOs, are subject to damage suits decided by corporate tribunals, which means the end of the legal sovereignty of countries.

The so-called trade partnerships are weapons of American economic imperialism.

Whether Trump and his advisors are aware of this or not, Trump has on his third day dealt a lethal blow to a power lusted after by US global corporations.

How will this formidable force respond to this blow inflicted upon them by Trump?

That remains to be seen if the blows that Trump has promised against the interests of the elites continue.

Global corporations are Fifth Columns in the countries in which they are incorporated and also in the foreign countries in which they do business. They have no loyalty to any country, only to the profits that comprise their bottom line. Anything that increases those profits they regard as legitimate. Anything that diminishes those profits they regard as illegitimate.

Modern capitalism is a profit-driven world, in which capitalists are devoid of the loyalty to their native countries that Adam Smith and David Ricardo assumed them to have. US global corporations have demonstrated their disloyalty to the US by moving US jobs to Asia. Think Apple, Nike, Levi, and all the rest. Jobs offshoring separates consumers from the incomes associated with the production of the goods that they consume, which leads to penury.

The rewards for the offshoring global corporations have been large profits from reduced labor and regulatory costs, resulting in executive “performance bonuses” and capital gains to shareholders and to executives with stock options or some similar income booster.

The costs have been the dismantling of the ladders of upward mobility that made the US an “opportunity society.” High productivity, high valued added manufacturing and professional skill jobs, such as software engineering jobs, have been moved offshore, and in the case of software jobs also given to foreign H1B work visa holders. The consequence is the collapse of the state, local, and federal tax base, and the consequent assault on Social Security, Medicare, and state and local pensions.

A county like the US that gives its GNP away to other countries is locked into a transformation from First World to Third World. This is what Trump has said he will reverse.

How can he do it? Is this something that he can deliver by cutting corporate tax rates and by imposing an import or border tax?

The US is a member of the World Trade Agreement, which prohibits tarrifs or “border taxes.” If this is correct, Trump would first have to pull the US out of the WTO, something that might be difficult.

However, what Trump can do is to offset the labor cost advantage to corporate profits from offshoring their production for US markets by changing how corporations are taxed.

If US corporations add value to their product in the US, that is, if they produce the products that they market to Americans in the US with American labor, they would have a lower tax rate than if they produce the products abroad with foreign labor. The difference in the tax rate can be calculated to offset, or more than offset, the advantage of the lower labor and regulatory costs abroad. This is a matter of domestic taxation and not a matter of tarrifs on foreign-produced goods, and, therefore, it is not subject to WTO rules.

Because of the globalist propaganda, Americans have forgotten that the strength of their economy was domestically-based. The development of the US economy was never based on foreign trade. It rested firmly in the rise of consumer spending power from America labor receiving the bulk of the productivity gains.

What jobs offshoring did was to transfer the income gains from productivity to corporate profits by underpaying Asian labor.

It was easy to pay Asian labor less than labor’s contribution to profit, because of the immense excess supply of Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, and other labor. When labor is plentiful and jobs are scarce, labor goes begging.

Even today the Chinese and Indian labor forces are under-employed. The only way American labor can compete is to accept a wage below the US standard of living.

Trump understands this, just as did Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan.

Ross Perot was a billionaire; yet he stood up for ordinary working Americans. Yet, the left says all billionaires are evil.

Pat Buchanan was royalty in the Republican Establishment; yet he deserted them and stood up for the ordinary working American. And the left says he is a “Nixon-Reagan fascist.”

Clearly, the pathetic remnant of the American left has more hate for those who stand up for the working class than they have for those oppressing the working class and those fomenting war. Why did the women so quick to march against Trump not march against the Clinton, Bush/Cheney, and Obama regimes for killing, maiming, orphaning, widowing, and dislocating millions of peoples in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria?

That we see the left aligned with the ruling elites against Trump is proof that the left has abandoned the working class.

Chris Hedges doesn’t know how desperately revolution is needed in the US. If revolution occurs, it is more likely to be led by Donald Trump than by the left.

Washington, D.C. – The much maligned Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a darling of the neoliberal establishment on both the left and the right, is dead in the water after President Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the US from the controversial free-trade pact.

The TPP was the largest global trade agreement since NAFTA, and would have included the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. Essentially the TPP was a policy move by the U.S. meant to create a trade bloc as a means of countering rising Chinese economic might — under the guise of an “Asian pivot” – but that was seen by many Americans as a give away to large multinational corporations.

Here is a short primer on the TPP and its partner legislation the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which reveal exactly how these deals were meant to operate:

Much of what the public knows about this secretive trade pact comes from leaks provided by the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks. If not for the information Wikileaks has provided, the public would be even more in the dark than they currently are, as to the details included within these trade deals.

Hillary Clinton was a supporter of the TPP, before later claiming to be against it, while her rival in the for the Democratic presidential nomination, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, railed against the trade pact on a regular basis as something that would hurt American workers.

Opposing the TPP was one of the central tenets of the Trump presidential campaign, as Trump attempted to tap into the angst of the blue collar working class that Senator Sanders had so effectively coalesced in his failed primary run. The new administration called the trade pact a “potential disaster” for the United States, and said they would instead prefer to engage in bilateral deals with the individual states involved in the trade deal.

Critics of the TPP argue that it gives unfair competitive advantages to large multinational corporations. They also say that it takes away sovereignty from countries and gives it to small decision-making bodies that are not beholden to the public – thus further helping the rich get richer on the backs of the poor.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation laid out a succinct case against the TPP that revealed the far-reaching scope and dangers inherent to the trade deal:

In a joint letter to Congress released today, more than 250 technology companies and user rights organizations say that the extreme level of secrecy surrounding trade negotiations have led to provisions in agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that threaten digital innovation, free speech, and access to knowledge online, and the letter calls on Congress to come out against the Fast Track, also known as Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), bill for legitimizing this secretive process…

The letter specifically identifies the TPP’s threats based on leaked texts of the agreement—how it threatens fair use, could lead to more costly forms of online copyright enforcement, criminalize whistleblowing and investigative journalism, and create investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) courts that would further jeopardize user protections in domestic laws.

Negotiations for the European-focused parallel trade deal, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), also have come to a sudden end.

Additionally, it appears the Trump administration has it sights set on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which eliminated commercial barriers between the US, Canada and Mexico during the Clinton administration.

READ MORE:For the First Time in Recorded History, High School Kids Choosing Pot Over Tobacco

“We are going to start renegotiating on NAFTA, on immigration and on security at the border,” Trump said on Sunday, after the swearing-in ceremony for senior White House staff.

It appears that this decision is one that many Americans, who aren’t part of the establishment-elite, were rooting for since long before Trump came onto the scene. Activists across the world have fought tirelessly to expose and defeat what they see as a give-away to industry and business at the expense of the average person.